The Newspaper Club Lets You Design and Print Your Own Newspaper

Did you work on your high school newspaper or yearbook? If so, there’s a new club in town. No tryouts necessary. All you have to do is sign up and those days of dreaming about being your own publisher are over. Thanks to the Newspaper Club, a new London-based startup, anyone can print their own 12-page newspaper.

A Legend in Its Own Time

As print becomes a relic of the past, a new fascination with print-based media is surfacing. The Newspaper Club takes you back to the days of yore and lets you self-publish on newsprint.

The Newspaper Club charges different amounts depending on the size of the print runs. It is about £330 (or £1.10 a copy) for 300 black-and-white issues of a newspaper, for example. For color, it will cost you more.

Using a tool called ARTHR, wannabe publishers can design their own newspaper to a decent standard. As well, wannabe desktop publishers can employ graphic design skills and upload their own versions via PDF.

Right now, the Newspaper Club is more of a novelty, being used to create cute wedding favors and tokens for family members. However, there are hopes that bloggers could use it offer print versions of their blogs or as a personal manifest of one’s views on politics or the cinema.

Presently, the Newspaper Club is exclusive to the UK as high shipping costs make shipping internationally not an option. However, the club is at SXSW this year trying to pitch an American version.

This Newsprint Smells Like Irony

As neat as the Newspaper Club is at offering users the opportunity of having their words in print, one can’t help but see the irony. As thousands of “real” newspapers face their demise and watch their subscriptions tank, some users are willingly paying more than their daily paper’s worth to produce their own.

On the other hand, perhaps newspapers will join the Newspaper Club and start using this model to produce and publish their own newspapers. It couldn’t hurt.